


A Philosopher Cannot Live Without Her Blood

by crankyoldman



Category: The Talos Principle (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:27:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21824392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crankyoldman/pseuds/crankyoldman
Summary: A history of games, or how Alex Drennan learned to learn.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 8
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	A Philosopher Cannot Live Without Her Blood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sandalwoodbox](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sandalwoodbox/gifts).



Alex never quite understood how far philosophy and science had gotten so far from each other in the public consciousness, let alone sociology. Everything was connected and had dependencies. To have people act as if it was strange that she would, along with C++, Assembly, whatever languages were necessary, would keep readings on ethics, treatises on the human condition within reach, and top of mind.

She never thought it extraordinary to explore the true depths of the subject matter. What point in creation was there if it was ill-informed, purposeless? 

\---

“This is the one I was talking about, Alex Drennan. I wanted you to meet.”

She often got these kinds of introductions. Get a scholarship to Cornell based on an essay about the potential rights of artificial beings, and you got a bit of a reputation. Alex never blamed anyone for their tendencies, and it wasn’t like she herself could help what fascinated her. 

“Hello.” She waited, knowing the onslaught of awkward questions were coming. _How could you study both philosophy and computer science? Why submit papers to sociology conferences? Did you happen to notice you were a girl and understood math?_

“Hey! I’m Taylor. Cindy said, you might be interested in our gaming group!”

Assumptions were really terrible as anything other than the beginning of an inquiry. She relaxed shoulders that she hadn’t realized had been tensed.

“What kind of games?”

“Ok, so it’s like this. Some of us in my program wanted to do something to let off steam. Turns out a lot of us game? But there’s always weird gatekeeping around that kind of thing, and people are always afraid to try something new. So all the games?”

“All the games?”

“Yeah, all the games.”

Maybe Alex wasn’t giving people enough credit. No one ever truly wanted to shut someone out. It just wasn’t human.

\---

Did anyone look at the system as a whole? 

By all accounts, the age they were living in was extraordinary. Goods could go from one side of the world to the other without people seeing how it was made, without exchanging money in person, just magic, a box that appeared at their doorstep.

Was the distance increasing? If you followed the goods, of course, it was.

But the messages, the writings, the voices, the images. Even a distant human still reached out, leaving a trail of themselves in what they built.

\---

“I don’t think I’m getting this.”

Super Mario Brothers was, according to Taylor, a ‘classic.’ But she’d never grown up with a console, only her computer. Alex’s training had been so very different.

“Platformers really can suck until your muscles start to respond as fast as your mind does.”

It was hard to not disengage, go back to her dorm, put on Pink Floyd, and get lost in the code. But she’d been stuck in her research for _weeks_ , and this group was supposed to help them get unstuck.

“But what if my muscles never do? What if working out the timing is irrelevant to its purpose?”

Taylor laughed. She was overthinking it again. Maybe.

“Alright, so I’m in education. We still debate the best pedagogy, how best to include all forms of learning styles. It’s intense because you only typically have one classroom and all sorts of kids in it.”

“So, what do you do?”

“You see how kids react to things. You experiment. You accept there’s no one way to develop.”

“And?”

He pointed at the tv with his controller. “And after this, we’ll learn about how you game, maybe then we can figure out how and if Super Mario Brothers can actually be fun for you.”

\---

Alex liked to think, given enough time, they were going to finally merge the mind and the body in study. There were some that were already exploring using biological processes to grow structures instead of manufacturing them. They could augment their reality instead of trying to suppress it. 

They really were so close as a species to evolving into non-destruction. 

\---

“I decided to bring a game today, because its my classic.”

It took her a minute to get the executable running. She’d moved the ADVENT.EXE file to multiple computers as she’d grown up, and getting the script running on a modern system wasn’t terribly easy. But she’d made her own emulator and patched it lovingly every time Windows tried to eradicate it (or her Linux system decided it was time to be picky). 

“So this is a text adventure that started out as one man’s attempt to translate his love of caving, and a Stanford student’s love of fantasy melding together. I think a lot of your tabletop types will really get a kick out of it.”

She sat back and watched for a bit. The first time Alex had played it, she was 11. Her dad had been trying to revive this retro Amiga computer, and he’d found this ancient floppy disk which had booted the game. _I’m sure you might get a kick out of something your old man used to mess around with._

At first, she had tried to draw a map of the cave, painstakingly trying to understand the clues. She’d lost three weeks of her spare time, working it out during her classes during the day, staying up late into the night. Alex was too stubborn to look online at forums, find out what other players had done, instead went to the source.

“How the heck do we get past this SNAKE?!”

“Dude, just chill. Let’s backtrack.”

The source being that it was programmed. Using an algorithm. Even if a real cave had served as its inspiration, drawn maps wouldn’t work. She had to think like a machine. _Think like an algorithm._

Taylor looked back from the screen and smiled at her. Enough being an observer, it was time to join her friends.

\---

It was kind of a cliche to point out how intertwined art really was to science. But whose art? She was always taken by Blake’s ability to take observation into an imaginative space, to express with words and haunting paintings and drawings.

But that was just the classics. There was so much art she had missed, so many perspectives that she couldn’t contain. Maybe that’s why Alex so appreciated the archivists because at least they wouldn’t forget.

Even if those in charge had that tendency.

\---

“Now that Alex melted our brains with an early text adventure, I wanted to get into something visual before I exploded.”

She wasn’t going to pretend anymore that she went to this group for just entertainment. There were so many problems with Alex’s project that her advisor had told her to just maybe take a break, focus on something else for a while. The work of the work in her coursework could almost be run on autopilot. 

Ironic, wasn’t it, how much she needed people to understand how to make their next step, birth a consciousness from ideas? Kind of ambitious for a graduate project.

The sharer of their current game was from the art department, and they were so aggressively _present_ when they spoke or did anything that Alex couldn’t help but be giddy they were finally sharing. 

“I was going to get you all into the Love-verse, but we needed to wildly diverge from text. So we’re playing The Path. Check your assumptions at the door.”

As soon as Alex got her copy running, she was immediately struck by how much she _couldn’t_ do in the game. It was beautiful but rigid. It confronted her, willing her to _look_. She wasn’t learning through failures in gameplay. She was learning through stories, told both visually and through emotions. Her emotions.

“That’s what’s missing! _This_.”

Alex often forgot that it was her outside voice she was using when it exploded out of her. Only Taylor didn’t jump; then again, what were best friends for if not to understand when you were up on your bullshit?

\---

There is never enough time. But add that all together, and collectively, they were eternal.

\---

Nadya had told her that this project was her baby; she was its leader. It was hard to believe that only a few months ago, she’d come back to Cornell to give a guest lecture on AI ethics, that her weird little graduate project was what brought her into this room with all of these brilliant people. 

_Well, Alex, remember how you used to feel about Mario? You’re about to propose something even wilder._

“I know we haven’t even scratched the surface yet on artificial consciousness. We’ve just skirted the Turing test. But the key isn’t that it has to be complete now, just that it has to _learn_. It’s going to need some very strange solutions if we’re to have anything left of a future.”

“It’s already pretty strange,” Omar said, but in good humor. They had to have something other than despair, else why would they even try?

“We need… games. I mean, that’s a start, but we’ll also need stories. Ideas. I’m going to reach out to a friend and see if he has any leads on engines because there’s no way we’ll have time to code all this from scratch, but Talos is going to need more than just puzzles. They’re going to need…”

“A soul?”

She swallowed. “Yeah. Like in art, like in writing, they can learn from us, develop their own sense of self from our struggles. Our emotions. We’re going to need to see if anyone in the interactive fiction community is around, or pedagogy. Like someone that might have worked with Bogost or Short or done things based on their work.”

“So it’s going to… play? For centuries?”

“It’s going to evolve. Grow. We can give some of the source material from the Archive to work with, but there’s going to need to be like… characters. It can’t just be put in a bare simulation without something to drive them, someone to interact with. And communication, maybe. I don’t know, but it’s going to take more than just physics to create life.”

“Sounds like we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you requester for such a fun fic prompt! If you didn't guess Taylor is the "best friend" mentioned in one of her logs, I wanted to give him a little fact time. I got a little meta with this, so I hope this provides some of what you were looking for!
> 
> Also: 
> 
> A list of some of the things alluded to, or referenced in this fic because I am a nerd like Alex who loves to learn:
> 
> Neri Oxman, who you can get a great intro to her work on Netflix’s “Abstract” which devotes an episode to her  
> Colossal Cave Adventure, which you can play on the AMC site related to the show “Halt and Catch Fire” here  
> The Path, an early art game from a studio that has inspired games like Journey and other renaissance weird beautiful art games  
> Ian Bogost, a writer, philosopher and indie game maker who critically examines games and learning in a way that makes me think Alex and Taylor would have read his work  
> Emily Short, a writer and incredibly influential person in the interactive fiction community, who actually is doing work with AI now.  
> Christine Love, writer game dev who does indie games that also make you wonder about reality that are also very very gay


End file.
